Advertise with InfoWorld

Posted at 12:54 PM PT, May 11, 1999
SAN FRANCISCO -- The lack of a disciplined approach to application development is the primary cause of the constant state of crisis management that pervades most IT organizations running Web sites, according to one vendor's head scientist.

In a wide-ranging speech Tuesday at the Software Development '99 West conference here on the ills that plague Web sites, Grady Booch, chief scientist at Rational Software, said that as the complexity of Web sites increases alongside scalability problems, the challenges facing developers are only going to increase.

"Most Web sites are built on top of spit and chicken wire, and we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy keeping them up," Booch said.

For example, Booch said Cisco Systems, which runs one of the most successful electronic-commerce sites on the Web, has more than 100 Webmasters running their site. The primary culprit for this state of affairs is a lack of planning caused by the rush to get a Web site up in the first place.

"Organizations set out to build a dog house, but wind up building a skyscraper made up of 10,000 dog houses," Booch said. "It's the organizations that set out to build a skyscraper that will ultimately succeed."

Most of those dog houses rely heavily on CGI scripts, he added, which tends to lower the return on investment in the site because each CGI script executes its own separate process.

To build Web applications that will stand the test of time, Booch said that developers need to design their sites around a component architecture based on the Universal Modeling Language (UML), which is now an industry standard for modeling systems.

"UML is the language of architecture for software," Booch said.

And with major changes to Web architectures underway with the advent of technologies such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Internet appliances based on Sun's Jini architecture or Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play initiative that will blur the distinction between clients and servers, the timing has never been better to adopt a structured approach to application development.

"Basically, the XML makes the Web look like one big object database," Booch said.

Michael Vizard is InfoWorld's executive news editor.